Overdue Spring Cleaning

She sat in the middle of the junk she layed out in her room. Junk that has been her life for the past nine years. She picked up a worn out baseball and threw it into the box in the corner.

***

One minute she was standing there, the next thing she knew, she was opening her eyes to the glare of the sun. A silhouette of a head blocked the rays. As her eyes focused, she could hear voices around her.

"There she is!"
"Hey, you ok?"
"How many fingers am I holding up?"

The head had a body. And arms to help her up. Just by her right foot lay a barely used glove and not too far from it, a baseball.

***

She held her breath as she put more things into the box. She would pause every now and then and hold on to an object. Hesitate. And toss it in.

The pile grew smaller. And in what seemed like the longest hour, she was able to clear her space. Nine years of her life sitting in a box by her feet. She picked up the box and walked out to the garbage bin and dumped everything in.

She threw everything away. No record kept of those days. All gone. It just came to a point where nothing in that box mattered anymore. She didn't have to hold a place for those things anymore.

She went back into her room and sat there. For a few minutes she just stayed there motionless. Contemplating on what she just did. And then came sadness. The sadness that always come when letting go of something. That sadness that would seem a little bittersweet just soon enough. And she felt the loss. And the urgency of the moment to say goodbye to those things which she once held so dear. Things which hold no more meaning to her.

How do you render something ivaluable after putting so much worth into it?
Why would you put value into something in the first place?
How do you determine what's worth and what's not?
Is there a classification guideline?

And a lot of things, a lot of people are worth it. Right?

No regrets, however. Those things are gone now. And she is still saying goodbye. And in a way, she is saying goodbye to the things that were. Things that will never be again. She felt it would be better if she had nothing tangible to hold on to. She can always keep them in her head. The only place where she can control these things. To change every minute detail as needed and to what she needed them to be. And she will always remember them for what they truly were. And they will be more meaningful that way. She didn't need some object to remind her.

They meant something. They mean something. Otherwise, she wouldn't be sitting there fighting the urge to dig that box out of the dumpster and cherish it for what it's worth.